The Point of No Return

Jeffrey Goldberg has a long piece in the Atlantic on whether or not Israel is going to attack Iran’s nukes. Here’s a hint: He thinks it’s going to be in the coming spring. The main question was, is, and continues to be: Will the aftereffects of bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities be worth the mission?

When the Israelis begin to bomb the uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz, the formerly secret enrichment site at Qom, the nuclear-research center at Esfahan, and possibly even the Bushehr reactor, along with the other main sites of the Iranian nuclear program, a short while after they depart en masse from their bases across Israel—regardless of whether they succeed in destroying Iran’s centrifuges and warhead and missile plants, or whether they fail miserably to even make a dent in Iran’s nuclear program—they stand a good chance of changing the Middle East forever; of sparking lethal reprisals, and even a full-blown regional war that could lead to the deaths of thousands of Israelis and Iranians, and possibly Arabs and Americans as well; of creating a crisis for Barack Obama that will dwarf Afghanistan in significance and complexity; of rupturing relations between Jerusalem and Washington, which is Israel’s only meaningful ally; of inadvertently solidifying the somewhat tenuous rule of the mullahs in Tehran; of causing the price of oil to spike to cataclysmic highs, launching the world economy into a period of turbulence not experienced since the autumn of 2008, or possibly since the oil shock of 1973; of placing communities across the Jewish diaspora in mortal danger, by making them targets of Iranian-sponsored terror attacks, as they have been in the past, in a limited though already lethal way; and of accelerating Israel’s conversion from a once-admired refuge for a persecuted people into a leper among nations.

I think that Goldberg is wrong about Israel ever having been admired; the expiration date on that was, oh, 1948. But I do think this is both an existential question and an existential battle for Israel. I also think that the mad mullahs of Iran most certainly would use nuclear weapons on Israel. They have stated quite plainly that they want to see a world without “Zionists,” and they absolutely mean the Jews of Israel (and probably the rest of us as well; Hassan Nasrallah once famously said that if all the Jews in the world gathered in Israel, that would save Hezbollah the effort of hunting them down to kill them).

I have also written about my worst-case scenario if Iran does get nuclear weapons and uses them on Israel, and Israel retaliates. Besides the millions dead in Iran and Israel, we will see worldwide attacks on Jewish communities, even here in America. Europe has a terrible record on protecting Jews from attacks. Hezbollah has been preparing sleeper cells for years, maybe for decades.

But what will we see if Israel bombs Iranian nuclear sites? Probably exactly what Goldberg details in the article, and also attacks on Jews in America, more deadly and widespread than we’ve ever seen.

This is a lose-lose situation. My only hope is that sanctions are beginning to bite, and perhaps the world is beginning to realize that time is running out.

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8 Responses to The Point of No Return

  1. Royce says:

    I think Israel was admired to a certain extent until the 1967 war, in which Israel had the audacity to actually defend themselves. Prior to that, the media could have, maybe not admiration, but some sympathy since they could still tag Israel as having a “victim” status.

    American liberals condemned Israel for taking out Iraq’s nuclear facility in 1981, but many others were thankful for this, particularly when we later had to go into Kuwait. The outcome would have been much different if Iraq had gained nuclear capability.

  2. chairwoman says:

    Let me assure you that Israel was extremely popular here in 1967.

    Many young Englishmen I knew at the time expressed envy for English Jewish boys who went to help the IDF.

    There were few aympathisers here for the Palestinian cause, and generally those that existed were openly antisemitic, and as Muslims were poorly represented amongst the electorate, our politicians had not yet started their love affair with Islam.

  3. Sona says:

    I think there was more people admiring Israel than opposed until the peace accords with Egypt and Jordan which shifted the paradigm from Israel vs. the Arab World to Israel vs. the Palestinians.

  4. @Sona: That’s actually a really good point about the narrative.

    @chairwoman: Where did you live then? I’m curious. Was there a large Jewish population in the area? So you’re saying that the British dislike for Israel happened only over, say, the last twenty years? You’re sure it’s not just wishful thinking?

    I wrote about how disliked Israel was before 1967 when Tony Judt idealized the world’s opinion of the Jewish state during the Six-Day War. There may have been a few weeks of goodwill when Israel beat back the combined Arab armies, but I’m thinking that was the exception rather than the rule. For instance, when the Mossad captured Adolph Eichmann, the UN passed a resolution condemning Israel for taking him out of Argentina—but not Argentina for hiding a Nazi war criminal. It was the only UN Security Council resolution in 1960.

  5. chairwoman says:

    Meryl, I’m a Londoner born and bred.

    Alhough there always have been antisemites in England, and the British Government has been less friendly to Israel than it should have been on occasion, the virulent antisemitism you see on the pages of the Guardian and Independent, and on BBC news bulletins, was not, and still is not, prevalent amongst the indigenous population here.

    Although I have lived for most of my life in Jewish areas, I worked in Central London, and it was the non-Jewish boys, and girls too, that I worked with who were the keen supporters of Israel that I mentioned.

    As to my experience of views outside the Jewish community in general, my husband, the late Chairman, although a practising atheist, was brought up in a church going Roman Catholic family in Liverpool. His family never showed, or said, anything to lead me to believe they were in any way prejudiced, they accepted that our daughter was, and would be brought up, Jewish. My father in law had been stationed in ‘Palestine’ during the war, and had made friends with many Jews. His business in Liverpool was in a Jewish area, and even though I am unable to visit him often due to my illness these days, and he is too old to visit me, we are still in touch, my brother-in-law regularly comes to London to see us.

    I have friends from many different ethnic groups, and in my life (I am 65), until recently, I had only been subjected to one antisemitic remark. I had refused to dance with a man somewhat shorter than myself when I was in my teens, and he called me a “Stuck up Jewish cow”.

    You are right, it is only in the last 20 years, as the population demographics have altered dramatically, that antisemitism and its alter ego, anti-Zionism have flourished and increased in popularity.

  6. Daily Alert’s policy experts summarize top Israel news for busy readers.  Read the synopsis of Atlantic Monthly piece at http://blog.dailyalert.org/2010/08/11/a-nuclearized-iran-approaching-the-point-of-no-return/

  7. Alex Bensky says:

    Two things, I think, contribute to the change in opinion regarding Israel, especially on the left of the political spectrum. One, as pointed out above, was 1967. A lot of leftists adopt viewpoints as a means of expressing moral superiority and righteousness, and when Israel ceased being an underdog, ceased being someone with whom one could display one’s goodness, it lost sympathy. Secondly, the Palestinians became an approved victim group, a group with whom solidarity must be expressed irrespective of either the group’s actual situation or its actual conduct.

  8. anon says:

    Alex is correct on his two things.

    But I would like to add a few more things, in my mind, that have caused leftish opinion to turn against Israel.

    The previous time Bibi was Prime Minister he pushed to turn Israel from being a “socialist” country to a “capitialist” country.
    Before that the left was able to use Israel as a “socialist” country that worked. After that the left could not do so. And
    so it turned against Israel and Zionism.

    Another thing would be when Begin and Likud started to court more fundamentalist Christians. Who have become quite supportive
    of Israel for that, and other, religious reasons. ( Myself included. )

    Also add in the fact that Israel has a incredibly effective military.

    All of these things plus what has been noted above, then, have incensed the left and their respective mouthpieces in Academia
    and the Media. So Israel has pushed way past the left’s tipping point of acceptability and is now legitimate target for both
    ‘de-ligitimization’ and ‘demonization’.

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